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Conduent Executive Interview

Over
the past year, Conduent has been in the process of establishing a new identity
as it transitions from being a company with universal recognition in one
industry sector to becoming one that will be widely acknowledged for what it
has already been doing successfully. When most people hear “Xerox,” the first things
that come to mind are copiers and document processing, but for many years,
Xerox had also been one of the world’s most successful business process service
companies, working with its thousands of clients to co-develop business process
services and solutions that produce consistently reliable and satisfying
interactions.

The decision
was made in 2016 to spin off the BPS portion of the business previously called Xerox Services to create an all-new publicly traded Conduent,
while the document management/printer business remained with the original
company. “It was always something of a challenge to gain widespread industry
recognition for our expertise in delivering customer care when so many people
thought of Xerox for other reasons,” said Christine Landry, Group Chief Executive
Consumer and Industrial Sector for Conduent.
“One of our goals now is to expand awareness of Conduent’s innovative
leadership as a valued business partner that delivers on its promises.”

Conduent conducts business in 40 nations and 18 industry
sectors, with strengths in government, healthcare, insurance, technology and
others. “We take a consultative approach in talking to our customers about the
kind of service offering they would like to deliver to their customers. Our
impetus is to eliminate confusion and provide clarity,” she said. “We have a
keen focus on key deliverables, and customer experience is one of our areas of primary
concern.”

In making the transition to next-generation CX, Conduent
leverages automation: digital, social, mobile and analytics to help drive desired
business outcomes. The Conduent Automation Suite, developed while it was still Xerox
Services, uses proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process
Automation (RPA) Tools, improves speech, accuracy, quality and regulatory
compliance by using software bots to perform routine manual tasks. “Our
solutions help to transform traditional care into an automated multi-channel
customer experience,” said Landry. “Conduent’s sophisticated machine
learning-based virtual agents can support human front-line personnel as well as
provide self-service options.”

Conduent’s
Automated Intelligence can control business process workflow and what users see
on their computer screens, creating a fully integrated single agent desktop that
can be deployed in a variety of industries. This software application can be
used to train agents as well as to help respond to callers’ inquiries. The
application reduces the need for extensive agent training on where to find the
answers to common customer inquiries – when handling a call, the application
knows where to retrieve the correct information, and records information from
the call for future use. The tool organizes information by topic and delivers it to the agent’s
touchscreen as an icon to enable easy access, making it possible for agents to
focus on callers instead of having to search through multiple software and legacy
applications.

However, Conduent is cognizant of the fact that many of their
clients have made extensive technology investments that they do not wish to
abandon. “The applications sit on top of thecustomers’ solution so
there is no need to make extensive rip-and-replace changes,” noted Landry.

In addition to its commitment to delivering a superior customer
experience through all potential points of contact, Conduent also prioritizes
providing consumers with the right answer the first time with personalization.
“We look at personalization holistically,” said Landry. “It’s a combination of
processes, people and technology.” Conduent
believes one of the most important tenets of offering personalized service is
the ability to anticipate the needs of those contacting its clients. This involves leveraging data that the company
already has, applying analytics to develop insights and identify reasons the
consumer is coming to it.

“Our analytics leverage data on the front end to help businesses
understand customer behavior,” said Landry. “We can enable clients to determine
buying patterns, detect sentiment patterns and then show them how to use the
available tools to be prepared to reach out to their customers even before they
make their next contact.” Conduent analytics also incorporate churn prediction
to allow companies to see why people are leaving and take action to prevent it.

“We work with our clients
to determine what they consider to be their overarching goals,” said Landry.
“In some cases, it’s as simple as trying to deflect millions of repeat calls,
decrease average handle time (AHT) or raise NPS ratings. But for many others,
the impetus is to improve revenue, control costs, and support organizational
transformation, as well as to strengthen engagement, measurably improve
customer satisfaction, and foster loyalty.”

Does every client that comes to Conduent know exactly what it wants?
“It’s improving,” said Landry. “While we still need to guide some companies on exactly
what they wish to achieve, more potential clients have a clearer vision of
their objectives than we saw a year ago.” In some instances, a client
outsources all customer-facing operations to Conduent, while in others there
are either multiple providers or a hybrid situation with the company both
maintaining its own contact center and working with Conduent as well. A number
of these clients have implemented best practices from Conduent into their own
operations.

“We
help businesses measure against their own ideas of what they’re accomplishing
versus what results they’re actually achieving,” said Landry. “By deploying
customer care analytics to help them understand what is really going on, we
provide insight into customer behavior, customer care processes and platforms.
We then can offer up specific improvement opportunities for customer care
operations. To augment these insights, we provide advanced agent productivity
tools that enable front-line personnel to resolve customer issues more quickly.
We also work with our clients to find ways to automate, giving their customer
direct access to the same information through the web and other
self-service tools.”

“Companies need to determine whether their knowledge management
systems are still tied to serving internal processes or policies as opposed to
actual problem solving,” said Landry. “To
provide automated and personalized customer interactions that operate
seamlessly across channels, they need to use data to build in best-of-breed
solutions to take the human agent out of the process. Our tools and analytics
enable companies to find the best path to personalization.”

Conduent has recently been named as a leader in Gartner’s
Customer Management Contact Center BPO report and in the 2017 Nelson Hall Vendor
Evaluation and Assessment NEAT report in Customer Management Services and
Telecommunications.